


Saudade

by thanatoph0bia



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Gen, Murder, also obligatory kobd but im not tagging that bc its not a theme or anything, an attempt was made to explore velocitronian culture and religion, generous headcanon, ive never done this before feel free to send tag suggestions lol, mostly OCs, technically you could call this a coping fic?, uhhhh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-22 05:15:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14301576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thanatoph0bia/pseuds/thanatoph0bia
Summary: While growing up in Delta, a young Knock Out witnesses a crime and becomes driven to find its perpetrator.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Howdy friends and neighbors, the summary of this little ditty is baby knock out solves a murder  
> Also I havent seen RID15 so its not part of this fics canon but it did influence me  
> Mostly headcanon from the mind of a maladaptive daydreamer so if you like exploration of cybertronian (sp. Velocitronian) cultural and religious idiosyncrasies than this is for you if that's not your thing you're not gonna like this  
> The more I think about it the more I realize this technically falls under the umbrella of specific coping fic??? but only technically  
> Probably influenced by other fics  
> This won't be very and will probably be condensed to one chapter once I've finished but I think posting it somewhere will shame me into finishing it

“So, what was it like growing up on Velocitron? That’s where you’re from, right?” It’s a well meaning, innocent question. Those little human optics are bright and eagerly focused on him.

Unfortunately, he has more important things to do. “Delta. I’m from Delta,” he says, and hopes the conversation stops there. He’s still on ‘probation,’ and the fact that he’s here alone with Ratchet’s favorite pet--

“Oh.” Oh. That felt bad.

Knock Out looks up from his datapad only to find Rafael burying his head into his computer. There’s the distinct sound of the human click-clicking into the keypad. Knock Out repressed a frustrated sigh. He was smart enough to work and talk, wasn’t he?

“It was... dynamic.” The clicking slowly stops. “Delta, Ibex, all the Velocitron cities are filled with skinny, pithy bots who somehow manage to run their mouths faster than their wheels, and I was one of them. As Delta moved over Velocitron, so did glyphs through the voxcoders of the Velocitronians. Those on the top side, at least.”

“The top side?” Rafael is peeking over his computer and tilting down the screen. 

“Hm? Oh, there was an underneath, that’s where the tankors lived. Down with the churning wheels that kept the cities marching across the desert. We called them the Ananarks. The slower, bulkier bots that didn’t fit with the racing lifestyle. Not without realignment.”

“Realignment?”

“It’s a type of cosmetic surgery where you cut away at a bots armor to try and change the armor boundaries. That by taking some off, the armor wants to keep its thickness and you can trick the patient’s repair nanites into re-adding to the armor on the internal side. Makes a bot more aerodynamic.” He pauses. “You do other things to, in realignment. I did, at least. I could make custom frames and pieces, like optics and t-cogs--”

“You can make t-cogs?”

Right, this was Bumblebee’s human friend and Bumblebee had lost his t-cog at one point, hadn’t he? Ratchet probably hadn’t been able to make a replacement, so how had-- the little organic was staring at him wide-eyed and speak quickly now-- “Yes, but I needed very specific materials and tools, like sentio metallico, which I don’t think you have here on Earth.” Given that the planet was Unicron’s corpse, Knock Out supposed that that wasn’t entirely true. “It was expensive, too. The only clients I ever made t-cogs for were very high-end Towers bots.” And the masked menace who had entered his medbay one day and practically begged him for one. Knock Out briefly wondered what had happened to Tarn. “It’s something very few knew how to do, even throughout the Commonwealth. You couldn’t exactly learn Realignment at medical clinics.” You could learn parts of it, sure. Some medics could make parts and wiring like how he learned to do, and they could make bots skinnier, but it wasn’t Realignment. Realignment you learned in dirty back-alley clinics in Ibex, as desperate racers tried to find an edge over the competition. Realignment you learned because you were helping your creators clean out a frame, separating dried energon from paint, and taking whatever internal circuitry wouldn’t be noticed by those who would be by later to pick it up. Realignment was late nights and taking apart botched t-cogs because they didn’t sound right when they moved and if he started over just one more time--

“And that’s what you did on Cybertron? Realignment?”

It was very validating to see the wonder in that tiny face. “Mm-hmm. I was the best. Still am, I suppose. Not like there was ever a lot of competition.” 

“What do you mean?”

“Well, its usually passed down through the family.”

“So, your parents realignment surgeons?”

“My creators, my family, we were Veloci-vos Mortilite. Mortilite is, it’s a sect of Guiding Hand followers who mainly worship Mortilus. Well, it’s not really worship, it’s more like a way of living knowing that-- memento mori, that’s the phrase you use. It’s like that. I mean, there’s a cultural aspect of dataghosts and such, but because you can find some of that with the other Veloci-vos and true Vosnians so I don’t really think it counts. But my creators were, okay you’re going to have to help me out with this one. They would examine offline frames to discover the cause of death, clean them up to give back to loved ones... You have words for that, I’m sure.” Knock Out looks up from his datapad towards the outcrop where Rafael is sitting.

His face is more skeptical now. “Sounds like some some kind of dual coroner-funeral thing. So, if cold construction was happening, what was the difference between a part made by hand and a part that was taken from a cold constructed frame?”

There wasn’t. And that’s what he told him. Provided it was integrated and produced properly, the two parts were virtually identical. Knock Out did like to think his t-cogs were better than any produced in a factory, though. But cold construction was a Cybertronian practice. The only cold constructed bots on Velocitron had been those stationed there, vacationers, or those who moved. “Most of the Mortilite didn’t like to let their skills be profitized, it was a heinous breach of morals for some old reason or another, but I didn’t have any such reservations.” A pause. “I always did like working with racers more than for the Towers bots, though.” 

For a moment it is quiet. Knock Out’s okay with that. He needed to finish checking over this form. It was better this way, too, because the less they interacted, the smaller the chance that Knock Out’s vox would get him in trouble. 

“You know, ‘dynamic’ doesn’t actually give me an idea of what growing up Mortilite in Delta would be like.” Rafael is testing his boundaries, and he knows it. 

But fortunately, he doesn’t know how lonely Knock Out’s been. “It doesn’t, does it?” He slides his optics over from his form to the organic shaking his head. Upon optical contact, though, Raf stills. 

It’s intimidating. Knock Out knows it is. His optics aren’t like the others, they’ve never been. They’ve marked him as ‘other’ for a very long time now. “Hmm. What Delta story would a little organic like to hear?” He clicked his glossa. “Well, once, when I was a sparkling, little sparking Knock Out, though you would have called me, ah, don’t help me! Oh, right, baby. Little baby Knock Out, haha!” It was a two-note staccato laugh. Most mechs had hated it. Breakdown hadn’t. “Anyway, little baby Knock Out once solved a murder.”

“Really?” That tone was flatter. This was good. This was familiar. A repertoire, banter, that’s what he needed.

“He did-- I did.” He sets the datapad down, stands up, moves his servo about his knee joint and lower thigh, “I would have been about this tall and younger than you I think.” He begins to pace and gesticulate. “Now, where do I start? Probably with the death of Carzap...”


	2. Chapter 2

Carzap had been an older, grumpier bot, whose joints had begun to fail him long before Knock Out had ever existed. His spark had guttered out in his recharge and his frame had been deposited here, on a berth beneath their house, so his creators could take parts out of it and make the frame not so stiff and some other things. Knock Out wasn’t really entirely sure what they did yet, though he was told he would have to do it eventually. But his creators said that, for now, he wasn’t allowed to touch the frames and he wasn’t supposed to be beneath the house by himself. Well, except for when the Iacon two-wheeler came poking around, then he was supposed to hide. 

Optera, that was the designation of the two-wheeler. Knock Out had met Optera only once. He had been coming back to the house after “a day on the town,” as his forge Notochord called it, to find Optera knocking and trying to talk to his creators. 

“Excuse me,” he had said, pushing past Optera to knock on the door. “Carrier! Let me in!” 

“Are you Knock Out?” The two-wheeler had asked. 

Knock Out had just narrowed his optics. He didn’t like strangers.

“Do you like living here in Delta?”

No response. 

“Have you ever considered--”

“Don’t you talk to my sparkling!” The door had opened. Circuit had grabbed Knock Out’s arm and pulled him inside. Red, circular optics boring into his, Circuit had told him, “Knock Out, you ever see him, or anyone else poking around here, you hide! You hide an you hide well!”

That was one of the first times he ever remembered being afraid. Circuit was afraid of so little, it shook him badly to see his carrier so stressed. 

Knock Out would only ever see Optera again once, many stellar cycles later, when he was whisked away to Iacon, and given to new creators (Dion and Synapse), and introduced to his new spark sibling Moonracer, a Camien not much younger than him. A status symbol, he would later realize, to “adopt” and “save” two sparklings from the perceived poverty of a colony world. It would be even later before he learned that Optera had offered his biological creators shanix in exchange for his “adoption,” and after stellar cycles of refusal, his creators had had a moment of financial weakness and agreed. That was millions of stellar cycles ago, and he still didn’t know how to feel about it. He supposed he was angry, just because he had never gotten along with Dion and Synapse the way he had with Circuit and Notochord. 

But, Carzap’s frame lay still beneath the house, and as Notochord was leaning over it, using his claws to pick out some tiny circuits lodged between the panels of spark casing, Knock Out sat next to it, kicking his pedes and turning his head to watch his forge work. 

“What’s that?” He asked. 

Notochord answered with a word Knock Out couldn’t remember, but he thinks it was Vosnian. “I’m going to melt it down for sentio metallico.”

He nodded. “Sounds good.” He started to ask something else when he heard Circuit shout his designation. 

“Uh-oh, that’s the boss,” he and Notochord’s optics met. “Better go see what he wants.”

Knock Out nodded and headed up the stairs. 

The stairs to the basement were hidden, through a faux tile on the floor which would fall and twist into stairs. As it was, he could only activate the stairs from the main floor and not the basement. That was the reason Knock Out wasn’t allowed into the basement when there wasn’t anyone already down there, in case he were to go down and the stairs were to retract up, he wouldn’t be able to reach the switch to pull them back down. It wasn’t that they were afraid he would misbehave, it was that they didn’t want him to be alone with the frames without an escape. Well, Notochord had expressed that that likely wouldn’t be an issue, but every time Circuit had given him a look.

Circuit had told Knock Out how, back when he was growing up in this house, he had gotten trapped downstairs once. They had had two frames laying cold and still on the five slabs, a conjuxed pair whose sparks had guttered after one was caught underneath a transport. 

“Synergy and Entropy, those were their designations,” Circuit had said, before describing how his creators had left the house one night, “and trouble maker me had to go investigate. I hadn’t met them before, I wanted to know what they looked like.” Of course, Circuit had tripped going down the stairs and hit the switch as he tumbled down. He then described Synergy’s mangled, still-leaking frame had sat up and began telling him how Entropy had cheated with some amica of his. Entropy’s frame had stood up and began yelling in earnest. 

The basement was rectangular, with two cabinets on the longer walls and five waist-high slabs running parallel to each other and the short walls (Knock Out remembers Notochord telling him how his spark sibling had a setup in Ibex which fit fifteen recharge slabs, “It’s beneath one of the racing stadiums, incase there’s an accident on the track.”). Circuit said he hid in the cabinet until his creators had returned, and said that as soon as they heard the door open, he could hear Synergy and Entropy lay back down on the slabs. Had told him how as soon as Circuit could hear his creators push down the stairs, he ran out of the cabinet and up to them as fast as he could.

“The spark may be gone, but its energy still percolates through the tubes and wiring of those who bore them. You heed me, Knock Out, and don’t go down there alone.” Circuit had said. But Knock Out was sneaky, and he learned that alone was how he liked to be down there. When it was quiet and he could explore his creators tools at his leisure, that’s how he liked it best.

Knock Out thought about that story every time he went up the stairs, and about what it would be like to have to run up them for real.

**Author's Note:**

> if you made it this far, thanks. appreciate it. really do.


End file.
